Andrei Sakharov

Russian physicist

• Born: May 21, 1921
• Birthplace: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)
• Died: December 14, 1989
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Sakharov’s work as a scientist and human rights activist made him an important international figure. His scientific work played a key role in the production of the first hydrogen bomb and later in the study of the structure of the universe. His calls for civil rights in the Soviet Union commanded attention and respect throughout the world and earned for him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Early Life

Andrei Sakharov (ahn-dray SAH-kah-rov) was born in Moscow, the son of Dmitri Sakharov, a professor of physics at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute and author of several classroom texts and popular science books. Beyond the fact that the family led a comfortable life in a large communal apartment, little is known about Sakharov’s childhood. By his own account, the major influence on him, apart from his parents, was his grandmother, who read to him every evening from the Gospel and such English authors as Charles Dickens and Christopher Marlowe. The atmosphere at home, he was later to write, was pervaded by a strong, traditional family spirit, “a liking for work, and dedication to mastery of one’s chosen profession.”

In 1938, Sakharov completed high school and entered Moscow State University as a student of physics and mathematics. He was graduated in 1942 as one of the most brilliant students in the annals of the university and was exempted from military service. Instead, he was assigned to work as an engineer in a war plant, where he developed several inventions relating to ammunition quality control. With the end of World War II, Sakharov resumed his studies, entering the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to work under Igor Tamm, the leading Soviet scientist in the field of quantum mechanics and the head of the institute’s theoretical division. In 1947, Sakharov was awarded the degree of candidate for doctor in science (roughly equivalent to the American Ph.D.) for his work on cosmic ray theory.

Life’s Work

Up to the mid-1960’s, Sakharov’s research focused on weapons development. In the spring of 1948, he became a member of a research team headed by Tamm, which worked under strict security on the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons. In 1950, Sakharov and Tamm achieved a breakthrough when they formulated the theoretical foundations of the hydrogen bomb . In recognition of this and other achievements in hydrogen weapons research, Sakharov was awarded the Stalin and Lenin prizes, and on three occasions he received the Order of Socialist Labor, the Soviet Union’s highest civilian honor. Shortly after the first testing of the hydrogen bomb in 1953, he received the title of doctor of science and was elected to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. At the age of thirty-two, he thereby became the youngest scientist ever to have reached this prestigious position. From then to 1968, he continued his work in the secret Soviet nuclear weapons research center.

Between January and March, 1958, the Soviet Union conducted a series of atmospheric nuclear tests. When it became known that an additional series was being planned for the autumn of the same year, Sakharov wrote an article in which he warned against severe genetic damage caused by atmospheric tests; to reduce international tension and decrease the threat of nuclear war, he demanded their total cessation. The same arguments were repeated in a memorandum that Sakharov sent to the chief scientific administrator of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, and this came to the attention of the Communist Party leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. What impact if any this had on Soviet policy is unclear, but, after concluding the 1958 tests, the Soviet Union joined the United States in an informal moratorium on nuclear atmospheric tests, which lasted until the summer of 1961.

Sakharov’s protest activities were soon extended beyond the issues relating to his research interests. Already in 1958 he had taken a stand against Khrushchev’s proposed reforms in secondary education, which would have required all students to devote two or three years to farm or factory work before graduation. In June, 1964, he took part in a successful effort to end the politically motivated scientific research associated with Trofim Lysenko and to resist Khrushchev’s demand to admit his followers to the Academy of Sciences. In so doing, he put himself squarely on the liberal side of an ideological conflict that had stunted the development of the biological and agricultural sciences in the Soviet Union since the mid-1930’s.

The year 1966 constituted a watershed in the direction of Sakharov’s political activity. With the fall of Khrushchev, conservative elements in the Communist Party sought to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin. On the eve of the party’s Twenty-third Congress, Sakharov, Tamm, and twenty-three other intellectuals signed an open letter opposing the move. Later in the same year, Sakharov again joined Tamm and others in signing a collective appeal to the Supreme Soviet to prevent the approval of decrees curtailing dissent that were being added to the criminal code. In February, 1967, he sent yet another appeal to Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev, protesting the arrest of four members of the group and demanding their release. This was his first attempt to intercede on behalf of individual citizens.

Sakharov’s conversion to dissidence was followed by his formulation of a theory linking his hitherto divergent social and political activities. Previously he had addressed his protests to the political and scientific elites. In 1968, however, he wrote an article that he published himself and that was smuggled to the West. The article constituted the first effort to relate the issues of civil rights in the Soviet Union to global peace and human progress. Its main thesis was that a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the West is the only alternative to thermonuclear holocaust. Moreover, only by pooling American and Soviet resources can humankind overcome the dangers of poverty, environmental pollution, and overpopulation. Without freedom of thought, Sakharov maintained, Soviet society will never attain the stage of peaceful convergence with the democratic world. Sakharov therefore advocated ending censorship and the suppression of dissidents as a first step in an ideal process that would culminate in the formation of a world government dedicated to the advancement of humankind.

Shortly after the article was published, Sakharov’s security clearance was withdrawn, and he was barred from all secret work. Earlier in the decade, he had begun research in macrophysics, resulting in several papers on the expansion of the universe and on the structure of quarks. In 1969, he continued his work on gravitation and the structure of the universe as a senior researcher in the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute. At about the same time, he suffered a personal loss with the death of his wife, Klavidia. It was in this period too that his political perspective underwent its final evolution. Up to his dismissal from the Soviet atomic weapons program, he was “isolated from the people” by his “extraordinary position of material privileges” and tended to treat world peace and human rights as theoretical problems. With the loss of these privileges, he became more acutely aware of concrete wrongs suffered by specific individuals and groups in society. This sensitivity was heightened through the work of the Moscow Human Rights Committee, which he founded with two younger physicists in the fall of 1970 to monitor and publicize human rights violations in the Soviet Union. This sense of moral obligation and urgency led Sakharov to embark on an accelerated campaign of letters, appeals, press interviews, and protestations on behalf of Jews seeking emigration, Crimean Tatars demanding repatriation, Ukrainian and Volga German nationalists, fellow dissidents, and political prisoners. During a protest vigil outside a courthouse where dissidents were standing trial, he met Elena Bonner-Alikhanova, and the two were married in 1972.

In September, 1972, Sakharov was detained by the police after participating in a demonstration protesting the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. This was the first episode in a campaign of harassment and intimidation that included the expulsion of his two stepchildren from the University of Moscow, press attacks on his views and activities, and summonses to appear before the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB). In August, 1973, after he had appealed to United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to intercede on behalf of dissidents confined to mental hospitals, Sakharov was called to a meeting with the deputy procurator-general, who threatened him with prosecution on the charges of defaming the state. A week later, in defiance of such pressures, Sakharov convened a press conference in his apartment to warn against “détente without democratization.” A month later, Sakharov appealed to the U.S. Congress, calling on it to support the Jackson-Vanik Amendment linking the Soviet Union’s preferred trade status to the level of Soviet emigration. In December, 1973, Sakharov was awarded the Human Rights Prize by the International League for the Rights of Man. Two years later, he became the first Soviet to win the Nobel Peace Prize. On both occasions, Sakharov was denied an exit visa to attend the ceremonies. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech was read by his wife, Bonner.

Despite Sakharov’s continuous defiance, he was not arrested until 1980. In January of that year, after denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and calling on the United Nations to persuade it to withdraw, he was stripped of his honors and banished without trial to Gorki, a military-industrial city officially closed to foreigners. Confined to the city limits, he was placed under KGB supervision, his mail was scrutinized, and he was forbidden any contact with other dissidents. Nevertheless, he continued his study of cosmology and the physics of elementary particles and was elected in 1980 and 1981 as a member of the Italian and French Academies of Sciences. At first, even his political work was not totally disrupted, for his statements and appeals were communicated to the outside world by his wife, who traveled back and forth between Moscow and Gorki. In 1984, however, Bonner too was restricted to Gorki after being accused of slandering the state.

Several days before Christmas, 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in person telephoned Sakharov to announce his release from exile. Back in Moscow, Sakharov resumed his scientific and political activities. A week after his return, he appeared on American television and vowed to continue the struggle for the liberation of all “prisoners of conscience.” A symbol of his changed status was the transmission of his interview through the satellite facilities of the Soviet government. Toward the end of 1988, Sakharov left the Soviet Union for the first time in his life for a tour of meetings with major European and American politicians, including United States President Ronald Reagan. While continuing his advocacy of civil rights in the Soviet Union and calling for Soviet troop cutbacks and reduction of military spending, he now called on the West to support Gorbachev’s reforms. In April, 1989, he was nominated by the Soviet Academy of Sciences for a seat in the new Soviet National Congress of Deputies. There he became a leader of the Interregional Deputies Group, a faction dedicated to the acceleration of reform in the Soviet Union. Sakharov continued his political dissent to the end of his life, which occurred on December 14, 1989. Only two days before his death, he engaged Gorbachev in an angry debate, demanding the abolition of the Communist Party’s monopoly of political power in the Soviet Union.

Significance

The final assessment of Sakharov’s scientific contribution must await the lifting of the veil of secrecy that still shrouds his military-related work. Nevertheless, it is clear that he played a key role in the production of the first hydrogen bomb and the industrial utilization of nuclear energy. He is also accepted as a pioneer in research into the structure of the universe and the quark phenomenon. These accomplishments were intimately related to his activities in the cause of human rights and global peace. His position at the pinnacle of Soviet society and fame as the developer of the thermonuclear bomb added weight to his arguments and enabled him, almost single-handedly, to change the dissident movement into a force that could not be ignored. He himself regarded his scientific and political endeavors as complementary aspects of a single quest for human dignity and a world in which science and technology can be harnessed for the advancement of humankind.

There is no available method by which to gauge Sakharov’s impact on the policies of his government. He admitted that his struggles to remedy specific wrongs “almost always met [with a] tragic absence of positive results.” However, perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the mere fact of his activity. He himself explained this clearly when he argued that, in a repressive society, “there is a need to create ideals even when you can’t see any route by which to achieve them, because if there are no ideals then there can be no hope and then one [is left] completely in the dark. . . .” His courage, personal example, and relentless advocacy of human rights helped keep alive ideas and aspirations without which no reforms are possible. The era of perestroika and glasnost, and his election to the National Congress of Deputies, may serve as proof that his efforts were not in vain.

Bibliography

Babyonyshev, Alexander, ed. On Sakharov. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. A collection of essays, stories, and poems written by prominent Soviet dissenters and dedicated to Sakharov, offering an insider’s view of the problems of the dissent movement and of Sakharov’s place within it.

Bonner, Elena. Alone Together. Translated by Alexander Cook. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. Written during Bonner’s six-month leave of absence from Gorki, this book contains important information about the activities of the Sakharovs in the 1980’s as well as interesting anecdotes about and insights into their personalities and private life.

Dorman, Peter. “Andrei Sakharov: The Conscience of a Liberal Scientist.” In Dissent in the U.S.S.R., edited by Rudolf Tökés. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. An excellent exposition of Sakharov’s social and political ideas based on his writings, statements, and activities up to 1974.

Gorelik, Gennady, with Antonina W. Bouis. The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist’s Path to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. An authoritative examination of Sakharov’s life and career, describing his transformation from a Soviet physicist to a public figure.

LeVert, Suzanne. The Sakharov File: A Study in Courage. New York: Julian Messner, 1986. Intended for young people but offers for all readers a good historical background and a clear account of Sakharov’s human rights activities.

Lourie, Richard. Sakharov: A Biography. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2000. Although discussing Sakharov’s scientific achievements to some degree, this biography focuses on his political life, placing his political activism within the framework of Soviet history.

Rubenstein, Joshua. Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980. Explores the origins and development of the dissident movement in Moscow through the lives and activities of Sakharov and other prominent human rights activists.

Sakharov, Andrei. Alarm and Hope. Edited by Efrem Yankelevich and Alfred Friendly, Jr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. A collection of Sakharov’s short writings, correspondence, and press interviews. Includes the text of his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize lecture and an appendix offering brief sketches of some of the individuals he sought to publicize and defend.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sakharov Speaks. Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. Contains a valuable foreword by Salisbury and some of the most important early writings of Sakharov himself, notably Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom and a 1973 interview with Olle Stenholm on his view of life and the goals of his human rights activities.